The Midas Code

by Boyd Morrison

  “I purchased the tablet several months later,” Cavano said, finishing the story. “It had been found with the hand and the manuscript, but it wasn’t part of the original auction. After the theft, the seller didn’t trust the auction house, so I was able to make a generous preemptive offer. I believed that tablet might have something to do with the search for Midas, but I could not divine its purpose. I thought I never would. Until now.”

  “What makes you think we know anything about this search for Midas?” Stacy said.

  “Because Jordan must be alive and in possession of the manuscript. He knows I’m days from returning to the Midas chamber myself, and he’s trying to beat me to it. Loyalty is prized above everything else in my culture, and Jordan betrayed me. For that, I will make him pay.”

  She pressed a button, and her bodyguard opened the door. He came in carrying the pack Tyler had put in the Range Rover’s trunk. The bodyguard laid it on the desk. Cavano reached in and pulled out the pack’s only content.

  The geolabe. Cavano’s eyes glittered as she looked at it.

  “Fascinating device. You’ll have to explain what it does later.”

  She put it back in the pack and spoke to the man in Italian. This went back and forth for a minute, and the man finally said, “Sì,” and left with the pack.

  “What do you want?” Tyler said.

  “I want you to help me find Jordan.”

  “We’d like to,” Stacy said, “but we don’t know how to find your cousin.”

  “You’re not a very good liar, Dr. Benedict.” Cavano drummed her fingers on the desk. “So. How much for you to give up your search and tell me where he is?”

  “How much?”

  “I’ll give you a share of the gold.”

  Tyler and Stacy looked at each other as if they were contemplating the offer. Tyler knew this offer would be made only once. If they turned it down, they would be forced to do what she wanted anyway. Tyler briefly considered allying with Cavano against Orr, but it was too risky. If he and Stacy weren’t able to complete their task, Orr would know they had failed. Then Sherman Locke and Carol Benedict would die.

  “Supposing we know anything about this,” Tyler said. “How do we know you can deliver our share if we turn him in to you?”

  Cavano smiled. “Remember the Ministry of Health building? I now own it. Or I will on Monday. Italian austerity measures forced its sale. Once I take possession, my demolition team will tear the foundation apart until we find the tunnel. After that, it will merely be a matter of time until I find the chamber. You can either get nothing with Jordan or you can name your price with me.”

  “And if we don’t know him?”

  “I’ll soon find out the truth if you don’t cooperate.” Cavano obviously meant torture.

  Tyler paused, then said, “Three million dollars. Each.”

  Stacy swung her head around so fast, her own hair hit her in the face. “What are you doing?”

  Tyler put a hand on her arm. “It’s okay. If she wants to triple the million Orr is paying each of us, I’m happy to go with the high bidder.” He looked at Stacy, who nodded slowly.

  Cavano arched her eyebrows. “Done. Three million.”

  She pressed the button again, and the bodyguard returned, this time holding a gun. He frisked Tyler and took his Leatherman multi-tool and cell phone. Stacy handed over her phone as well.

  “What’s this?” Tyler said. “What about our deal?”

  “I’m sorry,” Cavano said, “but I’ll have to detain you until our business is complete. If you fulfill your end of the bargain, you will get your three million dollars each, but until then you will have to remain here as my guests.” She spoke Italian again, leaving Tyler to guess that she was telling the bodyguard which room to lock them up in.

  “I am needed elsewhere at this time, so Pietro will show you where you’ll be staying. I assume you don’t mind sharing a room.” She grinned at her intimation and left.

  Pietro motioned with his pistol for them to get up. English didn’t seem to be his forte.

  Tyler and Stacy stood.

  “You know,” Tyler said, “you could shoot your eye out with that thing.”

  Nothing. The bodyguard’s face didn’t change a bit. Not that Tyler thought his joke was funny, but if the man understood even a bit of English, he’d at least expect a roll of the eyes.

  They began the walk down the hall, confident that they could talk without being understood.

  “So what do we do now?” Stacy said.

  “We get out of here.”

  “How?”

  “I’m working on it.”

  “Work faster.”

  The bodyguard said something in Italian and gestured for them to start climbing a wide marble staircase that wound around and up to a second-story balcony.

  At the first corner, an enormous porcelain vase was precariously perched on a wooden pedestal.

  Tyler nodded at it. “Be careful.”

  Stacy shot him an annoyed look. “You’re worried about a stupid vase—” That’s when Tyler pushed her into it with his hip.

  Stacy bumped the table, and the vase teetered over. Her instinct was to try to steady the delicate artwork, and that was exactly the first impulse of the bodyguard as well.

  Pietro was distracted for only a moment, but it was enough. He reached out to catch the vase, and when he did, Tyler slammed him into the wall. Pietro’s head knocked against the hardwood, and Tyler bashed his wrist at the same time. The pistol dropped to the marble, and so did Pietro, who cracked his head again. He tumbled down the stairs, still breathing but out cold.

  Tyler picked up the gun and took back his Leatherman and his phone. He also took Pietro’s phone and handed Stacy’s back to her. “Fast enough for you?”

  It had all happened so quickly that Stacy was still holding the vase.

  “What … I … ” she stammered as she pushed it back onto the stand.

  “Come on.” Tyler grabbed her arm, raced down the stairs, and turned toward the study.

  “Aren’t we getting the hell out of here?” Stacy said, looking over her shoulder.

  “Not without that tablet.”

  They ran into the study and closed the doors. Tyler flipped the gun around and used the butt to shatter the glass around the tablet.

  “Let me take it,” Stacy said. “It’s very fragile.”

  She plucked the hinged pieces of wood out of the display case and folded them together. Tyler was about to open the door for a dash to the Range Rover when shouts outside the office stopped him. Somebody had found Pietro.

  “Crap! What do we do now?” Stacy said.

  Tyler pointed to the field outside. “Through the window.”

  He took out Pietro’s phone and dialed a number as quickly as he could. He was relieved when it was answered on the first ring.

  “Aiden MacKenna.”

  “It’s Tyler.”

  “Whose phone are you—” Aiden started before Tyler interrupted him.

  “Aiden, start recording this call, and whatever you do, don’t hang up.”

  Tyler took the phone, reached as high as he could on the bookshelf, and placed it out of sight on top of a row of books.

  Stacy waved her hands at Tyler to hurry. “Let’s go!”

  He threw open the window. By now, alarms would be going off throughout the estate. Tyler didn’t know how many other Pietro types Cavano had, but he wouldn’t be surprised to see a small army materialize.

  He lowered Stacy to the ground, then jumped down. She started to run around the house, but Tyler pulled her in the other direction.

  “But the cars are that way,” she protested.

  “That’s where they’ll expect us to go.”

  “Aren’t we going to get the geolabe?”

  “We can’t right now. This way.” They ran for the stables. Tyler was hoping to find a workman’s car inside because it wouldn’t be long before Cavano’s men realized where they had gone. />
  In half a minute, they’d crossed the lawn and reached the stables. Tyler motioned for her to stay behind him. With the pistol in front of him, he opened the stable door and swept the room. Clear. No stable hands visible. Except for the chuffing of horses and the clopping of hooves pawing at the hay in the stalls, the stable was silent.

  There wasn’t a single vehicle in sight.

  “We’re out of luck,” Tyler said. “I thought they might have a pickup or something in here. Without a car, we’re stuck.”

  “What are you talking about?” Stacy said, pointing at the stalls. “These are even better than cars.”

  Tyler blanched when he realized what Stacy was suggesting. She wanted him to ride a horse.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  After a few more profuse apologies, Lumley went back to his office, leaving Grant on his own. As he walked through the hall of Greek statues and vases, Grant texted Tyler to tell him that someone had picked up the scent of the codex and warn his friend to be careful. Tyler replied immediately.

  Too late. We got probs of r own. Meet at Heathrow.

  That didn’t sound good, but at the moment Grant had to deal with his own situation. No doubt he could take the man tailing him in a fight, but an altercation might get the police involved, which would complicate things. If he had to, Grant would test his skills with Krav Maga, a style of fighting perfected by Israeli commandos, but he remembered an old joke about the merits of martial arts. When an elderly man was told that karate was the oldest form of self-defense, the man replied, “It ain’t older than running.”

  Running wasn’t something Grant did often, because speed wasn’t his strength. Strength was his strength. He looped the backpack around both shoulders, leaving his arms free, and he looked at his map of the museum. He was one room over from the gallery with the Elgin Marbles. There were only two exits. He could either go back and exit through the Great Court, or he could keep going forward, which would lead him through the gift shop.

  He didn’t like backtracking. Forward. Once he was outside, he would head back to the Underground and lose his shadow in the maze of passageways.

  The man stayed thirty feet behind him. Grant checked out his follower in the reflection of the glass cases.

  With acne-scarred cheeks and bushy black eyebrows, the guy wasn’t going to win an award in a Brad Pitt look-alike contest. But what he lacked in looks he more than made up for with his size. At least four inches taller than Grant, he had the bulk of a grizzly. The only place the guy would be inconspicuous was coming out of an NFL locker room.

  He carried himself as though no one would ever dare give him trouble, which meant that he likely got by on intimidation and brute force rather than any skill, so Grant wasn’t too worried even if the guy confronted him. He just had to make sure he lost the man before reinforcements could arrive.

  After the next archway, Grant turned left and picked up his pace, walking through two galleries and past the gift shop to the front entrance. Outside, it was a clear path through the courtyard to the entrance gate. From there it was just three blocks to the tube station.

  At the gate, Grant realized that he wouldn’t get that far. As he walked through the gate, two men got out of a BMW and penned him in. Both looked like uglier relatives of the big man following him. One of them had a thin, perfectly shaped mustache that must have taken an hour to trim, and the other had a widow’s peak sharp enough to be classified as a weapon.

  Grant turned and saw that the guy behind him had made up ground and was now only ten feet away.

  The man with the mustache called the big guy Sal and said something in Italian.

  “Sì,” Sal said. “Mr. Westfield, you come with us.”

  Grant took a look at the three of them, who now had him surrounded. “What if I don’t feel like it?”

  Sal held his coat open to show a holstered pistol, warning Grant that he wouldn’t get twenty feet without becoming a bull’s-eye.

  “You know, those are illegal in London,” Grant said. “You could get in big trouble if the bobbies caught you with that.”

  “You are in trouble.”

  “Gia Cavano sent you, didn’t she?”

  Sal’s eyes flickered at the mention of her name. “Get in the car.”

  “You really want to cause a stink out here?”

  Sal narrowed his gaze in confusion. He probably didn’t know what Grant meant. “Get in the car.”

  The three of them moved closer.

  Grant remained still, his muscles tensed. “So you want me to get in the car?”

  “Now.”

  They were within five feet of him.

  “I’m going to have to say, screw you,” Grant said.

  That got exactly the response he was hoping for. Sal nodded to the other two, who reached for Grant’s arms.

  Whoever they were, they were street brawlers, not trained in hand-to-hand combat as he was. If they had been, they wouldn’t have left themselves so open to attack.

  Grant swung his arm around and smashed mustache man in the back of the neck with brutal force. Before the guy with the widow’s peak could react, Grant threw his elbow back and slammed it into the side of his head. Both men went down in a heap.

  During the time it took for Grant to put the two men out of action, Sal drew his pistol, but he’d made the mistake of standing too close. Grant chopped his wrist, sending the gun to the sidewalk. Then he smashed his knee into Sal’s groin. Simple, but effective. Sal fell to his knees and toppled over, cradling his crotch and screaming in pain.

  Like most real fights Grant had been in, this one had lasted less than five seconds. Shaking his head at how easy it had been to disable the three men, Grant reached into their jackets and removed their guns. He ejected the magazines and removed the slides from each of the pistols before dumping them on the ground. There was no reason to make it easy for them to give chase, so he ran around to the driver’s side of the still-running car, shrugged off the backpack, and got in. He’d drive the BMW three blocks to the Underground station and dump it there.

  Putting the car in gear, Grant smiled at the men still lying on the ground. Through the open window, he called out, “Piece of advice, Sal. Next time, bring more men.”

  Then he stepped on the gas and left Sal still on his knees, shouting curses at him. Grant didn’t know what he said, but the Italian sure made it sound classy.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  I’m not getting on one of those death traps,” Tyler said.

  He kept watch at the stable door while Stacy hurried to cinch up the straps on the saddle of a second horse. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught him nervously changing his grip on the pistol and realized that he was more scared than she was. She had marveled at how he had calmly disarmed a massive explosive, faced down Orr, and dispatched a gunman without breaking a sweat. Now she was the one trying to quiet his nerves.

  “Come on, you big baby,” she said. “It’s just a horse. How else are we going to get away?” Cavano and her men would discover their hiding place any minute.

  “You go. I’ll try for the car.”

  “Don’t be stupid. You’ll get yourself killed. Don’t tell me you’ve never ridden.”

  “I have. About twenty-five years ago. That’s why I’d rather take my chances with Cavano.” He wouldn’t look at Stacy.

  They’d already gone over their options, and there weren’t any. The cars at the front of the house would be impossible to reach without getting captured. Calling the police wouldn’t help. At best, Cavano would say they assaulted her bodyguard and destroyed her property. Tyler and Stacy would be hauled off to jail, endangering any chance of meeting Orr in Naples on Sunday.

  Some of Stacy’s fondest memories were of riding her horse, Chanter. Dressage and jumping occupied a big part of her childhood, not to mention chasing rabbits around the fields after the harvest. She hadn’t had the opportunity lately, but saddling the horses had brought it all back. Technology marches on, but riding equipm
ent hadn’t changed significantly in hundreds of years, so she finished outfitting the horses in record time.

  “We’re ready,” she said. “Are you coming or not?”

  “Not.”

  “You’ll ride a motorcycle and not a horse?”

  “A motorcycle goes where I tell it to.”

  Now she got it. He was a product of the mechanical age, and he didn’t like it that a horse had a mind of its own. Something must have sparked this irrational fear, but she didn’t have time to dig into that now.

  She marched up to him and grabbed him by the arms. “You are going to get on that damned horse, and we’re going to get the hell out of here, do you understand me?”

  Bullets ricocheted off the door, and both of them dove to the ground. Through the crack in the door, she could see four men running toward them, snapping off shots with their pistols.

  “All right,” Tyler growled as he rolled to his feet. “We’ll do it your way.”

  Stacy leaped up and handed the reins of the nearer horse to Tyler, who acted as if she’d given him a used tissue. He eyed the horse, but another crack of gunfire goaded him into action. He put his foot in the stirrup and, in the most ungainly display of horsemanship she’d ever seen, clambered into the saddle. He pawed at the leather.

  “Where is the horn thing?” He was talking about the grip on the front of Western saddles.

  She mounted her own horse. “It’s an English saddle, so it doesn’t have one. Just keep your feet in the stirrups and don’t let go of the reins. Follow me. Your horse will do the rest.”

  Stacy trotted to the large door that was open at the opposite end of the stable. With a jab from her heels, the horse launched into a gallop.

  Over her shoulder she saw Tyler’s horse go into a trot, with Tyler bouncing up and down like one of those rubber balls on a paddle board.

  “Say ‘canter’!” she yelled.

  Tyler cried, “Canter, dammit!” and his horse took off, with him barely holding on. He looked like an idiot, but he was moving.